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Abstract
Migration in India, particularly in rural areas, is dominated by the
movements of women for the purpose of marriage. We seek to explain these
mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among Indian households.
In particular, we hypothesize that the marrying out of daughters to
locationally distant, dispersed yet kinship-related households, are
manifestations of implicit inter-household contractual arrangements aimed at
mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an
environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant
risks. Analysis of longitudinal South Indian village data lends support to
the hypothesis. Marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a
reduction in the variability of household food consumption. Farm households
afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance
marriage cum migration. The hypothesized and observed marriage cum
migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or
migration which are concerned primarily with search costs and static income
gains.